These are sane points. However, given the circumstances I don't understand why releasing a new product when it already feels few years old at launch. Just to keep themselves busy? Keep practicing releases?
Maybe they could have channelled that energy towards beating Apple instead...
That I can't answer. My guess is it's to meet some sort of contract they have together, like Microsoft sells laptops with AMD processors and gets a better deal on Xbox components. The AMD SKUs seem to top out at 16GB of RAM and smaller SSDs, which signals to me MS doesn't expect to sell as many.
